Colin Wright's Blog, page 12

Red Thread

The term “red thread of fate” originates in Chinese folklore, referring to a bond between people who haven’t met, but who are destined to be with each other.

The term is also used, contemporarily, in reference to an invisible connection between people or things—often, a connective ligament that stands out like a bright red thread when you notice it, but which is quite small and easy to miss if you’ve never intentionally sought it out.

I heard this term used in reference to writing stories ...

Walking

With every step you take, it’s possible you might fall.

That’s not pessimism, it’s the reality of being a perambulatory human being.

Mathematical models have demonstrated that walking is just falling over and over again, but—and this is essential—it also means controlling the fall in such a way that it propels us forward, moving us a smidgeon closer to where we want to be instead of landing us flat on the ground.

These falls are irregular and require a flurry of tiny corrections with ea...

Am I That Me?

On a semi-regular basis, I go through a period where I question essentially everything I do and how I do those things in an attempt to bring my behaviors into alignment with the most up-to-date iteration of myself.

This flurry of self-updating often aligns with some kind of milestone moment: the beginning of some new life chapter like a move or a birthday or a breakup. But not always.

Sometimes the desire to work through this kind of assessment-and-recalibration process comes out of nowher...

Experimental Stippling

I’m a big fan of personal experimentation.

I find that regularly tweaking the variables that inform my thinking, shape my day, and feed my productive output helps me stay excited about all the things I do (and might do), while also giving me a more three-dimensional view of those same things—which at times helps me identify better ways of doing them or alternatives that might be a more optimal investment of my time and energy.

Such experiments also sometimes help me realize that a dramatic...

Continuum of Selves

I’m aware, as I make loose plans for my post-pandemic lifestyle, that I’m making these plans as a pandemic-immersed version of myself.

This is both exceedingly obvious and deceptively easy to forget as I make these plans.

The me of today has been in lockdown for over a year, has been short on socializing and novelty and physical contact, and has been situationally locked into habits based on the same fundamental variables for a very long time.

This version of myself, then, is looking at...

Exoskeletons

Ideally, the tools we use amplify our capabilities.

I often visualize my tools as a sort of exoskeleton: an Iron Man suit, or the kind used for lifting heavy things and fighting multi-mouthed xenos in Alien.

For better and for worse, it’s possible to replace rather than enhance oneself using similar technologies and systems; robot laborers and warriors rather than tech-suits worn by humans. And in some cases such an approach will make perfect sense, while in others it will provide short-te...

Input, Process, Output

Whatever our professions and however our lives are structured, our days are filled with inputs.

These inputs are sensory by definition—sights, sounds, tactile sensations, tastes, smells—but they contain a boggling assortment of information, ranging from the aesthetic to survival-related data, from the interpersonal to knowledge of meta-national importance.

We also generally engage in some kind of production on a daily basis; our generative acts culminating in different types of output.

...

Imagining the Mundane

A heuristic is a mental shortcut, and one of my most commonly used heuristics is to imagine the most boring, conventional, mundane version of sometime before making any decisions about it.

When deciding on a new home base—a rental apartment, for instance—it’s tempting to envision a version of my life that is optimal and heightened before mentally placing it in that space and deciding whether it’s the right fit.

Yes, there’s a chance that I will use all that extra square-footage, and there’...

Beyond Why

It’s prudent to semi-regularly ask ourselves why we do various things, and why we do them the way we do them.

This isn’t a complicated concept but it can be tricky to implement productively: we humans tend to be skilled ritualizers and heuristics-developers—makers of physical and mental shortcuts—because habits and shorthand-thinking tend to save us time and energy.

As a consequence of these often-beneficial traits, we may also, even when very consciously asking ourselves “why?” about some...

The Right Lessons

I don’t find regret to be particularly useful, though it’s sometimes difficult to avoid.

Regret can play a role in productive reassessment, triggering the reflex to look back and consider. I find that its knee-jerk utility often stops there, however, leaving me in a reflective-limbo; worrying over something that went wrong, but not doing anything useful with that information.

I have several habits meant to help close this deficit, but the most straightforward and boring one tends to be the...